"Be Clear" @ Why you have created a website for your business ? – "Purpose"

"Be Clear" @ What & How would you get the benefits out of it ? – "Prospects"

Preparing yourself completely for the online platform is a big hurdle in itself. You need to even test the direction air flowing. Must know the facts and pitfalls, that may attack your motto of getting online. If you are ready to expand your reach in online market then comes the objectives you would have set already before choosing this option.

Being Clear on those points, its time to move next level. Understand the overview of opportunities you will get in return.

You are surely not alone in your business: Smell the reach and benefits of your competitors. "While choosing the best or big, don’t forget to choose the least or small".

It is seem that even good companies with good names find it hard to survive. The reason is so simple, they failed to rectify these two Basic or Initial Objectives.

Goals

One can track the records of discrete actions taken to accomplish the business objectives.

Goals are basically helpful in measuring in depth, how well your website is achieving the objectives. One can set individual Goals to track records like business transactions with minimum purchase amount or amount of time spent on a particular webpage.

Google Analytics, being one of the major and complete Analytics Package, is widely used as a Web Analytics Tool.

The topic being so wide, may take a number of sessions but our efforts here would make you clarify of the basics at least. And, details in depth are covered in other sessions.

Dimensions

Dimension is an attribute or characteristic that defines different values.

Dimensions can be of descriptive type defining a particular category of a functional group such as Ad Group, Page Title, Page, Refined Keyword etc.

Google has defined the difference between Dimensions & Metrics with a very common attributes as references.

Metrics

Metrics are the simple numbers or terms referred to calculate different kind of data.

Metrics may include data categorized into different variables such as bounce rate, bounces, time on page, visitors, % New visits and so on.

For instance:

Visitor Metric is used to check in detail who has visited your site, and where did he come from, how long did he stick to your website.

Some more of the metrics are discussed below in KPIs.

KPIs – Key Performance Indicators

A major metric that helps in implementing your business purpose.

Although KPIs are also metrics, but they play the lead role to let you understand and implement, where you have to pay attention for your objectives.

KPIs can be varied from industry to industry and the type of website, and should be compared time to time.

Particularly, tells the successful conversion of visits into sales by the visitors who have viewed your content or visited your website.

Goals Conversion Rate: In Google Analytics, this rate decided the number of visitors who have been successfully reached to one of the goals at least setup by you through Google Analytics service.

According to Google, For the selected goal n (you can have from 1 -20 goals), this metric shows the percentage of visits that resulted in a conversion to that goal.

Bounce Rate: As a very important KPI factor bounce rate describes the effectiveness and quality of your website, how capable is it of bounding your visitors for long.

Ideal Bounce Rate should be 0%. This ensures that your web page is quietly bounding your visitors to be engaged. Many people believe that Bounce rate and Conversion rate are inversely proportional to each other which are in fact have no comparison. The topic is actually debatable. But, Expert knows the truth – To know the difference you need to understand both separately.

Time on Page: This factor is different than the bounce rate as the maximum is Avg. time on particular page of your website the maximum is the Quality of your webpage that made the visitors to be engaged.

In order to get an average time on page for a specific page, the total time spent on a page for the selected date range is divided by the number of unique visits to that page. The value is shown in minutes.

Audience or User Defined Variable: The User Defined factor simply tells you a detailed report about particular users who have finished a goal set by you or have successfully filled forms on your webpages.

Google says – This report lets you see visitor statistics by custom visitor segments you have defined with the _setVar method in your tracking code. For example, if visitors fill out a form on your site in which they provide a professional title (such as manager, technical specialist, or marketer), you can call _setVar to capture and store their selections.

Traffic Sources: It is basically named as an at-a-glance view of traffic-source metrics by Google. This lets you focusing on quality of traffic via time on page, bounce rate, successful transactions etc.) along with total number of visitors.

In this one can see the last month visits, all traffic sources by percentage, and in the table, metrics for the following dimensions:

Search Traffic Keyword

Search Traffic Matched Search Query

Search Traffic Source

Referral Traffic Source

Direct Traffic Landing Page

Click each dimension to see the relevant metrics (e.g., for the Keyword dimension, you see values for individual keywords). For each metric, you see the count and percent of visits.

From here the purpose of dimensions and KPIs, dimensions and metrics, Metrics and KPIs are almost cleared uniquely.